While Awaiting Sitecore Commerce 9...

Hetal Dave,Technical Lead

November 7, 2017

This year's Sitecore Symposium 2017 was filled with major platform launches and heavily anticipated product announcements. Aside from the introduction of Sitecore XP 9, I was most excited for the introduction Sitecore Experience Commerce 9. Although Sitecore Commerce 9 will be released in 2018, the commerce focused sessions at this year’s conference only added to the anticipation and excitement of the new capabilities and features to come in the latest release.

While we await the Sitecore Experience Commerce release, and all the technical advancements of the new platform, let's get on the same page on what's to come.

Welcome, the Sitecore Experience Commerce Platform!

OLD vs. NEW

Goodbye to the old, and hello to the new.

Goodbye to Commerce Server: All Legacy Commerce Server code is now gone, including the COM components. This also means, no more dealing with Commerce Server Pipelines that were too unfriendly to modify and debug.

Goodbye to Commerce Server Business Applications: Business Management tools such as Catalog Manager, Customer & Orders Manager, and Pricing & Promotion Manager are now completely integrated within the efficient and user friendly Sitecore Experience interface.

Hello to New UI: Sitecore Experience Commerce Platform offers a single interface to manage content, commerce and experience components. The new UI is implemented with SPEAK3 and Angular4 framework replacing the old SPEAK UI to provide better performance.

Fly High with Cloud Support

Ships with Azure PaaS support providing ability to push content and implementations and High Availability/Disaster Recovery plan for Sitecore sites.

Extended Smartness

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is smart, and offers:

Plugin/s that can be installed as nugget package, and the items that are not needed can be removed just as easily. As needed, new plugins can be created easily.

Extendable entities that are used for business logic implementation in the new and improved Commerce Experience Engine. This makes the engine light, simpler and efficient, and easy to extend and/or customize.

Support for multiple inventory sets including, Online, In Store or both. Inventory can be transferred between inventory sets.

Federated authentication that is now supported in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 as well. This addition makes it easy to extend, integrate, and connect with external systems.

Impressive framework for Commerce Personalization with page events, goals, and outcomes. Out of the box Commerce Conditions for personalization and default engagement plans for Commerce Engagement Automation are also included.

Aggregated analytics based experience reports for all visits and contacts ranging from Orders to Campaigns to Shopping Cart activity and much more.

Migration/Upgrade Support

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 will have the Migration tool support for migrating data from previous Sitecore Commerce version/s. We personally cannot wait to try this one out.

For Teams

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is perfect for teams, as it provides:

The extension of the Sitecore Experience Accelerator(SXA). With the release we will have the Storefront SXA – an out-of-the-box commerce storefront built on Sitecore Experience Accelerator framework with 40+ commerce specific components ready to use.

Main components that are divided into three modules – Catalog Module, Cart Module, and Checkout Module. These modules are ready to use and contain customizable storefront components such as product list sorting, facets, paging, minicart, checkout components, and more.

Let’s Talk B2B

Sitecore 9+ will introduce serious B2B support including but not limited to:

Hierarchical Organizations

Quotes

Customer based price books

SXA components for B2B

So, there you have it! 2018 will be the year of Commerce. We are filled with anticipation, excitement, and enthusiasm as we await Sitecore Experience Commerce 9. Have questions, interested in Sitecore Commerce, or want to assess your readiness for an upgrade? Contact us and we’ll help you evaluate your business needs and technology stack to ensure you are ready for success.